The Presentation
or, The Acquaintance
One afternoon in 2018, while working at a marketing agency in Brooklyn, I traveled to Manhattan for a presentation by a college acquaintance at the office of my employer’s corporate parent near Madison Square Park.
In 2010—the last time I’d seen the acquaintance—I was an intern at a men’s magazine. In front of mutual friends, the acquaintance derisively pretended I was, instead, an intern at a women’s magazine. Eight years later, I remained eager for his approval, if only because revenge seemed infeasible.
In 2018, the acquaintance was working neither for my employer, the Brooklyn agency, nor its corporate parent; he was, rather, the latter’s invited guest. His presentation—on emerging trends in advertising as inferred from his experience “on the ground” at Cannes—was a hit on the industry circuit.
How good could it be, I wondered. Surely he hasn’t been Trying.
It was, in fact, a tremendous presentation. I felt newly armed with insight into the Future Of My Industry in a near-actionable way. I imagined the kind of house he could probably buy.
Writing the above—or rather, adapting it from an old iPhone note—and imagining for the first time what the acquaintance might think were he to read it, I considered for the first time the possibility that the acquaintance was simply mistaken in 2010, that he was sincerely under the impression that I worked for a women’s magazine—surely the more likely scenario, being better suited to reality, where even my actual enemies pay less attention to me than I like to imagine. Meanwhile, why was working at a women’s magazine supposed to be insulting in the first place? Retiring his role in my mind’s puppet theater of insecurity, I remembered what the acquaintance, as a person, is actually like—which is to say, a nice dude. Emerson said people are at all times better than they appear. Until the end of this paragraph I am pretending that my acquaintance I am what Emerson meant.
SEE YOU NEXT FRIDAY, MY DEAR FRIENDS (and acquaintances).